Alien Storm

Copyright : Sega | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

It?s that time again, Aliens once again descend on planet Earth and try to take away what civilisation we have left in order to breed on this planet without us getting in the way.

The only team that can stop them is yours, recruited by the US government to save planet earth and remove these life sucking aliens before they remove us it?s action packed arcade adventure all the way through in the style Sega know best.

Graphics

Alien Storm was another massive arcade hit by the monsters of arcade fun, Sega, back in the early 90?s this machine took in more money than Microsoft in the space of a year. The Amstrad conversion is actually pretty good with great use of colours from the original arcade and pretty much all the nasty alien creatures in tact, obvisouly some of the high detailed backgrounds had to be removed to increase the speed the game runs at (mainly visible in stage 2 of the game) but other than that everything appears to look great.

As with all arcade conversions to 8-bit machines something has to give and in this case it?s the overall speed at which the game runs, okay the arcade took on a real-time walking speed but our hero feels like he is 60 years old in this conversion as the frame rate gets reduced - something that could easily be avoided.

Sound

The sound system is pretty nice with an accurate conversion of the title theme from the arcade and some very nice alien explosions and squeals in the game itself, the backing music has been removed from the sideways scrolling beat-em-up sections while the entire sound seemed to be missing in the first person shooting area. Again we suspect this is lazy programming rather than a limitation on the Amstrads side of things but we could be wrong.

Gameplay

Those that bought this game when the original arcade was released certainly wouldn?t have been let down by the quality of the conversion, sure it doesn?t run as fast as the original but what conversion was perfect? it?s still great fun blasting aliens despite the pitfalls the game seems to have fallen into and it?s a long way from being as bad as Segas last conversion of the racing game Out Run.

And for those that missed out on the original you might want to give this a try, it?s less than a third in size of the MAME version and it will give you a pretty good estimate of how the game feels. All in all this is a pretty nice conversion by the guys over at Sega but like the others it could be better than it is.